Most liberals fool themselves into thinking they appear intelligent by assuming the intellectual mannerisms of people rumored to be superior intellects.  College professors are supposed to spend their time thinking, but most of them embrace ideas that are proudly unhinged from common sense.  Intellectually lazy liberals hitch their brain wagons to the same mules that teach college.  More accurately, perhaps, they embrace any new idea that comes along to show that they think outside of the box, even when the idea is outside the box only because it escaped before it could be completely formed.  Liberals point to their college degrees like Muslims point to the Koran: to end arguments.  Even liberals who don't go to college can adopt collegiate pseudo-intellectual trappings to make themselves appear to have intelligence, like little girls putting on makeup to look older in the hope that it will also make them look wiser.  But the purpose and effect of putting on makeup is not to look wiser, but to look more attractive.  And to a liberal, looking good feels better than looking smart.  That is, unless you're a 50-something hippie with long gray hair and wire-rimmed glasses and Birkenstock sandals and . . . .

Santayana's observation that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it is not lost on conservatives.  Liberals don't care about the past.  They claim to care only about the future.  But in doing so they try to draw a straight line from just one point (the present), or they argue that straight lines are too simplistic to have any value.  [Not to mention that straight seems to be a dirty word to liberals.]  True, some of today's older and wiser liberals look back to when their history began (the Vietnam war) as a warning to the present.  But the true relevance of Santayana in this case is that today's liberals don't remember what Vietnam was about, if indeed they ever knew at all.  They were wrong about it back then and are wrong about it now.  Their opposition to the war was based on their narcissistic aversion to risking death, or otherwise having their lives disrupted, for any reason whatsoever.  Their heads hurt when they were asked to contemplate whether there was any cause worth dying for.

If you dress like a CEO, people will think you are a CEO or at least qualified to be one.  If you act like a college professor, people will think you are brilliant like a college professor.  Fortunately, more people are learning to distinguish the subtle but vital differences between being brilliant and merely being scatterbrained.

By letting feelings trump morals (which is human survival logic), liberals diminish the value of their contributions to society.  How the left and right view the conflict of values provides broad insight into the difference in their approach to problems.  The interaction of partisans on each side is called a culture war by conservatives and insane right-wing racist fascist nazi hate-mongering by those on the left.

The struggle has been going on a long time and it shows no signs of abating.  The argument can be made that liberals are necessary for cultures to "advance."  Of course, not every change is an "advance."  One would think that liberals who proudly espouse Darwin's theories would understand this.  If culture is an organism, each new liberal idea is a mutation that either makes the society stronger or kills it.  The useless mutations always outnumber the useful ones by orders of magnitude, like liberals themselves.  There's a saying (Chinese, I believe) that expresses the idea elegantly: "If change is not necessary, then it's necessary not to change."  (I said Chinese instead of the politically correct but insultingly meaningless Asian, because I frankly don't think the Pakistanis deserve any credit for this idea.)

Liberals will flaunt their strongest emotions and dimmest wits arguing that the most execrable changes are necessary to correct some trumped up bit of unfairness, like the unjust denial since human life began of the right to marry one's pet cat with the government's blessing.  Then they will campaign to paint those who disagree with their novel ideas radicals!  "Radical Christians" is the wrong term for people who deny "Anything goes!" is one of the Ten Commandments.

When one side ignores standards of logic and reasonable rules of engagement, rational discussion is impossible.

Like the scorpion crossing the stream on the turtle's back, liberals, by their very nature, cannot seem to refrain from insisting on their right to kill the culture/turtle they can't live without.  

Cultures must be better than others to survive.  That's no guarantee they will survive . . . only that they have a reason to try to survive.  

Religions are the same way.  Religions, born of perceptions of the supernatural and refined by interaction with nature, are at the heart of morals.  Western civilization and its component cultures are based on moral precepts based on Judeo-Christian religious values, but Western governments these days try to function independently of any particular religion.  I say try, because although these governments preside over robust cultures, they and their cultures begin faltering when they maintain rules based on religious principles while denying that the rules by which they operate have any historical grounding in religion whatsoever.

The guiding moral principles on which the members of society agree to operate and maintain order began with ancient religious principles, but are kept in place today because they are still good ideas.  The question arises whether these good ideas came to man from God or whether man discovered these rules on his own the hard way and then made God up afterward.  At this point, one wonders why man would bother to make God up if the rules for living were already obvious.  Since not all humans learned at the same time what works and what doesn't, perhaps God was conceived by the discoverers of the rules as a means to persuade others to obey the rules; God would be an all-powerful, supernatural enforcer who would be looking over one's shoulder and punishing transgressors, if not in this life then forever in the afterlife.

In fact, this seems to be the case in pre-Jewish or non-Jewish cultures that actually had rational moral codes.  The theory goes, though, that God intervened through the Jews after the human race kept stumbling, lost in the wilderness of its own logical constructs.

The United States, undisputedly the brightest light of Western civilization over the last two centuries, agonizes the most (and the most publicly) about acknowledging its religious roots.  But some people fear that acknowledging the relationship between man-made law and its religious roots will mean that they will be compelled to admit to a state-sponsored religion.  That's unreasonable but understandable given the secular revisionism of public schools, which has caused a decline in the ability of its students and graduates to think clearly.

In many European countries, religion has been suppressed in the interest of perfecting governments where religion need never be referenced, where anything supernatural has no place, where there is no invisible hand on one's shoulder to guide him, and where only an individual's conscience guides his behavior.  A sense of some common good or government compulsion is the only thing that keeps the individual European's behavior in line.  

In the Islamic world with the notable exception of Turkey, the idea that one can separate church and state is illogical and unacceptable.  This is a powerful one-two punch in the gut for our troops who fight for their own country, the greater good of civilization, and the right to worship their own way.  Muslims fight for their country, the entire Muslim brotherhood, and directly for a God who tells them that all people must worship Him or die, or, rather, be killed.  The doorway to Paradise opens for believers if and only if they murder infidels.  [This makes no sense to those reared in the Western tradition, but as Pope Benedict recalled in his Regensburg speech, the Islamic conception of Allah is that He is so transcendent that He is not bound to act in ways that make sense to humans.]  The synergistic relationship among mosque and state and the unification of interests of all members of the umma makes Muslims motivated fighters. The people they are fighting for at home are in complete solidarity with the jihadists.  Muslims permit themselves no opportunity to become morally confused.  

It's sad that Western soldiers are constantly reminded that they're putting their lives on the line for people who don't appreciate it.  This weakens the odds when G.I. Joe meets Jihad Joe.

When you have to stop your car, it resists.  The harder you try to stop, the more it resists.  Still, you must prevail over your car because lives might be at stake.

The more you want to buy something, the more the merchant will raise his price to counter your demand.  Still, you must prevail if you need to buy this thing.

If someone attacks us, we defend ourselves.  If you attack us in our homes, we'll fight harder.  This is why a vastly outnumbered Confederacy held off Union forces for so long.  (As one southern soldier put it when asked by his northern enemy why he was fighting so hard to defend the Confederacy, "Because you're down here!")

Nazis did not kill American soldiers until we sent our boys overseas to kill them.  Is there any doubt that the urgency of defending the fatherland probably generated more bloody resistance to the Allied campaign?

In all four of these examples, which are among hundreds, the central question is "So what?"

For President Bush's detractors in the Democratic Party and the mainstream media to emphasize leaked, and now declassified, intelligence observations that our military operations in Iraq contributed to an increase in international terrorism against the West is a disingenuous attempt to confuse the American people and incite opposition to the other more  relevant intelligence observations that they are deliberately underreporting, namely, that failure to prevail would be much worse.

Bill Clinton tried, but failed again, to bolster his reputation to outpace Jimmy Carter as our worst former president.  On Fox News Sunday last, Chris Wallace got a career boost by asking President Clinton a simple question that exploded into what the cynical media types call "good television."  In response to Mr. Wallace's question about Mr. Clinton's terror-fighting effectiveness, the ex-president appeared to lose his temper, accusing Fox of being part of the vast right-wing conspiracy that his wife made up a few years ago.  Just because Fox News is not biased as far left as the other news networks does NOT mean that it is on the right wing.  Only someone like Mr. Clinton would have us believe something that silly.  

Mr. Clinton's narcissistic outburst will not improve how history views him.  Even if the Clinton administration did not take the al-Qaeda threat as seriously as it could have, and in retrospect probably should have, the fact is that nobody in the Western world except a handful of the cleverest analysts were concerned about a coordinated Islamic terror movement over the last 20 years.  It was not until the 9/11 attacks that the dot connections became obvious.  What will hurt Slick Willy most about his tirade is that he tried to defend himself with bald-faced lies about how vitally concerned he was about Osama bin Laden.  Self-aggrandizing lies pulled out of thin air we have come to expect regularly from Mr. Clinton's vice president and Mr. Wallace's Harvard classmate, Al Gore, but this performance was a new low, even for Clinton.  To his credit, he said he tried and failed.  To his greater debit, that was also a lie, for he failed to try.  And need it be mentioned that blaming others for his problems is a classic symptom of pathological liberalism?

Speaking of Chris Wallace:

Mr. Wallace has come a long way from when he interviewed me in 1981 about a goldfish that had disappeared from the birdbath in the foyer of Congressman Melvin Price's office on the third floor of the Rayburn House Office Building.  The disappearance occurred sometime between the election of Ronald Reagan and his inauguration, and Mr. Wallace, a political correspondent in NBC's Washington Bureau, was dispatched to investigate.  What Mr. Wallace was supposed to find out was whether the fish could possibly have been stolen by evil Republicans in a bizarre ritual to celebrate their victory.

I admit to being a bit apprehensive when Mr. Wallace arrived unannounced with his cameraman, because he looked just like his father, whose sensationalistic reports on 60 Minutes every Sunday night would keep our office busy answering mail from gullible viewer-constituents all week.  Back in those days, the only reason I tuned in to 60 Minutes was to know what our mail would be about that week.  Fortunately, Chris was not Mike.

Had I been more like many of my colleagues in other Democrat congressional offices, I might have taken the opportunity to join the NBC conspiracy theorists in making a mountain of this pitiful molehill.  But since I was not a jackass, I told Chris there was nothing to this story.  The fish probably died and disappeared through one of the holes in the fake rocks cemented to the bottom of the structure.  Chris seemed relieved, because he knew that the whole thing was silly.  Again, fortunately, Chris was not Mike.

[ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED SEPTEMBER 21, 2006]

Fulton County Superior Court Judge T. Jackson Bedford, Jr., recently struck down a Georgia law requiring voters to show government-issued photo identification at the polls. The ID requirement was intended to prevent voter fraud, particularly in an age when there are increasing concerns about illegal immigration and border security.  But the judge wrote that such a requirement violates the Georgia constitution because it would deny the right to vote to people who would be otherwise qualified but for that one small detail of actually proving who they say they are.  Hizzoner also went so far as to opine forcefully, "This cannot be."

Proponents of the law cited an Atlanta Journal-Constitution article stating 5,000 dead people were listed as having voted in the last eight statewide elections before 2000.
 
The plaintiffs' lawyer, former Georgia governor Roy Barnes (Democrat, of course), said that requiring voters to show identification is "the most sinister scheme I've ever seen." This speaks volumes about how pure he must have been as governor.  Besides, he said, voting fraud occurs mostly in absentee balloting where there is no need for voter identification.  Apparently Judge Bedford did not notice that Gov. Barnes was arguing against his own position when he admitted that voter fraud increases when voter identification is not required. This why the Democratic Party supports absentee ballots for everyone and no voter identification for anyone.  As we learned in the 2004 presidential election, however, Democrats will go to almost any lengths to disallow the absentee ballots of soldiers overseas, because those ballots are more likely to be unfavorable to Democrats.  This is just one more bit of evidence that Democrats are more willing to use end-justifies-the-means tactics to win elections than Republicans are, if for no other reason than that Republicans are more likely to believe in H*ll.

In the end, Judge Bedford agreed with the plaintiffs that a photo ID requirement places too much of a burden on voters.  In other words, the right to vote is so important that it trumps the integrity of the election process.  This is in the same logical league with other suicidal liberal positions, like defending the right to press freedom by publishing information that would hurt the defenders of that right and aid the most implacable enemies of that right.  Or like demanding that we treat captured enemy combatants like honored guests so that our soldiers won't be mistreated when captured.  Or like demanding that we release enemy combatants back into the field where they will be so grateful for our benevolence that they will think twice before murdering another 3,000 innocent civilians.  Or like demanding that we change what we are so that our enemies will like us.  Or like cutting defense capability in favor of social programs, so that no one will have to go back to work before the jihad reaches Martin Luther King Drive.

Apparently it is better that five thousand dead voters fraudulently elect the wrong candidate than that a single law-abiding citizen be denied, by his own negligence, to vote for the right one.

[ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED SEPTEMBER 20, 2006]

When foreigners seem hostile to the United States for any reason that threatens liberals, the liberals say we need to understand other cultures, particularly "why they hate us."  Frankly, given the state of the cultures that DO hate us, I'm glad they do because the things they stand for (totalitarianism, cannibalism, slavery, poverty for all but the ruling classes, to name just a few examples) are pretty much not the things the United States stands for.  I'm not at all averse to understanding other cultures.  It is in our best interests to understand other cultures, particularly when they threaten to destroy ours. 

Trying to understand other cultures from the standpoint that no culture is better than any other misses the very POINT of culture.   A culture can exist if and only if it IS better than others.  Before you scoff at that assertion because it seems impossible for all cultures to be better than all others, allow me to add that a culture must be better than all others IN A WAY THAT MAKES ITS MEMBERS WANT TO KEEP THAT CULTURE. 

Having just stated that the validity of a culture depends entirely on its members' opinions, I acknowledge that some people might think that this is weak reasoning.  As liberal leaders know (and count on) everyone is entitled to his own opinion and there is no law that requires an opinion to be supported.  Therefore, liberal politicians know, as deep down as their shallow hearts let them go, that opinions are generally not worth the split-second of thought that forms them.

If you do not think your culture is better than your enemy's, then you have no incentive to put your life on the line to defend it.  In fact, you would have to think you'd be better off fighting for the other side.  This is why it is so troubling to see supposedly intelligent "liberals" take the positions they do. 

The common denominators of liberal thought, their unifying themes, are "feelings" and anti-capitalism.  Liberals will abandon all logic to avoid hurting anyone's feelings, unless the person potentially injured has money he earned, which means he has no heart and therefore no feelings to hurt.

[ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED SEPTEMBER 19, 2006]

Liberals complain about the environment as though humans were not a part of it and as though the environment has significant meaning beyond how it exists for the benefit of humans.  Before you stop reading because you think you know what I'm going to say next, think again.  When humans speak of their environment, they are speaking only of THEIR environment as they perceive it, THEIR environment, which is brutally ambivalent about what humans do.  Humans cannot destroy their environment.  They can perceive it.  They can change it in some ways.  They can even make it less hospitable for human habitation if they try hard enough.  But this is a far cry from destroying it. 

If someone drew a mustache on the Mona Lisa with a permanent marker, art lovers would not necessarily be considered unreasonable in claiming the masterpiece was destroyed.  The painting would be defaced, diminished, and made much less attractive (no matter how talented the mustache artist), but it would not be destroyed in the physical sense.  Destroyed in the aesthetic sense, yes, for we know how DaVinci wanted his painting to look, and obscuring DaVinci's vision behind the irreverent commentary of the vandal has the effect of destroying it.  Fair enough?

Destroying the environment is another story.  It changes constantly and people adapt to it constantly.  The proposition of so-called environmentalists that the way the environment is today is the way God intended it for all time is fatuous nonsense.  It is strange that they would adopt this sort of unchanging conservationist posture toward the environment (which, like DaVinci's painting, means nothing beyond how humans perceive it) while they reject any sort of moral conservationism or political conservatism that would have far more significance to the way humans exist in the world.  To assume that a spotted owl's feelings would be hurt and that its anger at the human race would fester into a depression so deep that only a trial lawyer could cure it is just plain loony. 

Anthropomorphically putting the assumed best interests of animals ahead of the known best interests of innocent humans (if any human in the radical environmentalist's view can be considered innocent) is immoral.  Nature is designed—Oh, that word!—so that each of its species puts its own interests ahead of every other species.  For humans to be the only species to act against its own self-interest for the benefit of other species is a hopelessly vain attempt to fool Mother Nature.  But Mother Nature herself doesn't really care whether spotted owls or humans become extinct.  She was around for a long time with no organic life forms for company, not even Oprah.  The only reason radical environmentalists want to conserve nature as it exists is their species-centric, egotistical desire to look at it the same way they always have, just as the art lovers want the Mona Lisa to stay clean shaven.

The Mona Lisa was intelligently designed and we know who the designer was.  The radical leftist environmentalists seem to be saying that nature was designed by an "artist" who deserves similar reverence.  One would think the leaders of the environmentalist movement would be embarrassed to find themselves in the same boat as real Nature Worshippers instead of those folks from the Church of NIPERMM (Nothing In Particular Except Random Molecular Movement).  But that's not really what the leaders of the environmental movement care about.  Anti-capitalism is what drives them.  If any proposed development for human benefit promises to have only neutral or positive benefits for the spotted owl, the mere fact that the proposal is for the benefit of humans means, in zero-sum environmentalist dogma, that it will be bad for the environment.  (Remember, we humans are locked in a life-or-death struggle with other living things, all of whom are unionized against our continued existence.) 

It is not politically correct to note that the environment constantly changes for reasons that have nothing to do with humans, but it is accepted in liberal circles to point out at every opportunity that human presence always changes the environment for the worse.  The theory is that whenever humans deliberately modify their environment, capitalism is at work and must be opposed because university professors have deemed it evil, perhaps because they were turned down for jobs at Walmart.

And that brings me to our old friend who is about as lively as the Mona Lisa, but without the smile:  Al Gore, whom history will remember mostly for his shamelessness in making the most wildly unsupportable assertions that ever bored anyone to death.  His latest bit of twaddle is the assertion that global warming is a much greater threat than Islamofascism.  To believe his own statement, Senator Gore must necessarily believe two things about the nature of "destruction":  The first thing is that "destroying" innocent people because they haven't upgraded their moral operating systems from Christianity 2000 to Islam 1.1 is, as problems go, not all that pressing.  The second thing is that making people slightly warmer over the next century will "destroy" not only the human race but also the entire earth. 

That innocent people are being murdered by Islamofascists today is less of a problem for Senator Gore than that their descendents, if they live to have any, might have to contend with bad weather.  How could someone who markets himself as such a smarty-pants make such a moral equivalency?  The inconvenient truth of the matter is that Senator Gore is not really as stupid as he sounds.  He does not believe what he says about global warming and overstates its severity to get attention.  He is a professional Democrat who says whatever he thinks is necessary to get Democrats elected, though he's gone too far around the bend to be effective.  There are many who uncritically accept what he says, however, because it's easier than thinking for themselves and it gives them something to worry about that doesn't really make them all that nervous.  After all, there are crazed Muslims at large who would actually kill American environmentalists if they had half a chance.

The next time Big Al comes on the tube to tell us about the Next Big Thing in planetary destruction scares, I'm going to change the channel.  I only wish I could get the video feed of the Louvre's security camera that features all Mona Lisa, all the time.  At least there would be some movement to watch.

[ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED SEPTEMBER 18, 2006]

Anyone who has even lived with an alcoholic family member, particularly a parent, is aware of the insidious effects it has on the psyche of the nonalcoholic family members.  Alcoholics are predictable in their unpredictability.  The child of an alcoholic often develops depression after years of never being able to do anything right, never being able to please the parent, because a normal system of rewards and punishments does not exist in the family of the alcoholic.  Rewards and punishments follow no logical or reliable pattern.  This impacts the children of alcoholics in serious ways that are beyond the purview of these paragraphs, but medical research and common sense both indicate the impact of an alcoholic parent takes seven generations to dampen out.

What brings this to mind is a part of Pope Benedict's speech at Regensburg University that did not get media coverage or encourage radical imams to whip their congregations into a murderous frenzy during Friday's services.

The Pope spoke at length about the idea that "spreading the faith through violence is something unreasonable. Violence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul."  As the Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus was supposed to have said in a text referenced by the Pope:

"God is not pleased by blood, and not acting reasonably is contrary to God's nature.  Faith is born of the soul, not the body.  Whoever would lead someone to faith needs the ability to speak well and to reason properly, without violence and threats . . . .  To convince a reasonable soul, one does not need a strong arm, or weapons of any kind, or any other means of threatening a person with death . . . ."

Then the Pope said this:

"The decisive statement in this argument against violent conversion is this: not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God's nature. The editor [of Emperor Paleologus's dialogue], Theodore Khoury, observes: 'For the emperor, as a Byzantine shaped by Greek philosophy, this statement is self-evident. But for Muslim teaching, God is absolutely transcendent.  His will is not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality.'  Here Khoury quotes a work of the noted French Islamist R. Arnaldez, who points out that [early Muslim theologian] Ibn Hazn went so far as to state that God is not bound even by his own word, and that nothing would oblige him to reveal the truth to us.  Were it God's will, we would even have to practice idolatry."

So while the God of the Western world is omnipotent, it is against his nature to act unreasonably.  On the other hand, God in the Islamic view is also omnipotent, but in no way constrained to act in ways his earthly children can understand.   Allah's absolute transcendence allows Him to act in ways that His children cannot even begin to understand.  The only thing they know is that He is great beyond human imagination and must be obeyed without question because the human mind cannot even conceive of anything worthy to ask him without insulting him.  Apparently, Allah is an unreasonable and irrational God.

Does this mean that anything a Muslim is capable of conceiving could meet with Allah's approval?  Yes, particularly if the imams who completely made up the bit about the 72 virgins say so.

What we have, then, is Allah the irrational, Allah the unreasonable, Allah the alcoholic.  Drinking alcohol is forbidden to Muslims, but apparently Allah Himself likes to imbibe, because to hear Islamic theologians describe Him, He behaves like a typical, irrational, self-contradicting, alcoholic parent.  Allah's earthly children are both enablers and victims and will do anything to keep from making Him angry, even doing the most outrageously irrational things in His name.  They are depressed and overemotional about their lot in life and often take it out on others in violent ways.  Too many members of the Muslim umma are what psychologists call adult children.  

I call this disorder Allaholism.

[ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED SEPTEMBER 18, 2006]

Murphy's Law says that if anything can go wrong, it will go wrong.  Misapplying this leads to "If an opinion can be wrong, it will be wrong."  (Maybe this is because motorheaded Americans equate "being" with "going.")  In the United States, anyone can think what he wants, and although it would be nice if his opinions were "informed," requiring informed opinions would discriminate against the stup—  er, that is, the "differently intelligenced" folks who can't seem to get the hang of distinguishing what's reasonable from what isn't.  Giving one person's opinion more weight than another's is "judgmental" and therefore "discriminatory."  I know that's silly, but there are those who believe it. 

What about another misapplication of a famous law, Newton's third law of motion, which says that for every action, there is an equal but opposite reaction?   For every opinion, there is an equal but opposite opinion.  How many people have died because they didn’t really have a proper feel for Newton's laws?  Or for the effects of combining equal but opposite opinions, which, we have learned the hard way, really do not cancel each other out (unless we're lawmakers looking for PAC money)?

Speaking of the value of opinions:

It used to be that when someone was engaged in a discussion or argument, one of the participants would rudely dismiss the other with his trump argument:  "Well, that's YOUR opinion!"  I have noticed recently a significant change in the way people say this.  I am hearing more frequently the stress on the last word:  "Well, that's your OPINION!"  What allowed this approach to become successful as a debate tool was the discovery that reasonable people could differ.  Two reasonable people could have different opinions, perhaps even opposite opinions, about the same thing.  From that discovery, someone inferred a corollary, albeit incorrect, that having a different opinion did not necessarily mean you were wrong.  Anyone can form an opinion about anything at all.  Some people might have more insight or intelligence than others, so their opinions might be seen has having more value.  But that was viewed by some social engineer as being discriminatory against people who were born with below-average ability to put thoughts together or people who, for whatever reason, simply did not want to put thoughts together. 

In a free society, I am told, anyone can think what he wants.  There is no requirement that what he thinks requires some rational basis.  So with no "gold standard" to back up our intellectual currency (ideas and opinions), they cannot be valued.  If they cannot be valued objectively, then they might as well have no value at all.  What happens is that your ideas have great value to you, and other people's ideas have NO value to you.  Ideas and opinions are no longer media of exchange, and everyone is free to think what he wants.  Because ideas govern actions, and therefore actions can be seen as the ultimate expression of ideas, people think their own actions are a form of constitutionally protected free speech.  "I can ignore whatever another man has to say because, as a mere person, he cannot know anything that cannot be proven to be objective truth, so all he can have is an opinion about it, an opinion based on his perception of it.  Because it is his opinion it does not have to be my opinion, and because it is opinion, its relationship to the truth, if there is such a thing, is pure chance, and to the extent it does not make sense to what I want to be my own opinion, it should be ignored."  This is a sad state of affairs.

The devaluing of opinions has led to a rule of thumb for politicians:  Perception is reality.  This means that the truth in one person's eyes is what he thinks it is.  If enough people perceive the truth this way, then the politician's job security depends on giving people what they [think they] want, and therefore it is a waste of the politician's time to try to convince them that they really want something else, even if the politician has been able to see the truth!  If the sailor in the crow's nest yells "Iceberg!" it might not be what the passengers or the crew wants to hear.  They can ignore his warning in the hope that he might be wrong, but they usually don't ignore him, because his position in the crow's nest qualifies him as an expert.  If his opinion is about something that immediately threatens their lives and about which they can know nothing themselves, then they might be more inclined to believe him.  If his iceberg announcement were about which kind of lettuce made the best salad, the passengers would be more inclined to ignore him.

The attachment of value to opinions grows the closer a society perceives itself to extinction.  It's like that last gallon of fuel that is treasured and conserved if that's all one has left.

Strange to say, after all the foregoing, many people still hunger to know what other people think.  Perhaps this is because they have become conditioned to distrust their own ability to think, thanks to the liberal leftist popular media practice of dismissing any thought that doesn't fit on a bumper sticker.  Apparently they are willing to listen to the opinions of just about anyone who is better than they are:  They listen to Bono's thoughts on third-world debt relief because he's a rock star.  They listen to Barbara Streisand bash Republicans because she's a good singer.  They listen to Janeane Garafolo when she's not funny because there was once a time when she was.  On the other hand, people listen to conservative talk radio because of the ideas they hear, not necessarily because the commentators used to be something else.  Unless, of course, its because they used to be Democrats, like Bill Bennett, Dennis Prager, Michael Medved, Charles Krauthammer, and David Horowitz.  Being liberal means never having to say you're sensible.

[ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED SEPTEMBER 14, 2006]

Why do more people migrate from liberalism toward conservatism than the other way around?  At one level, humans tend to move away from centuries-old traditions and create their own.  Fewer and fewer societies look today as they did a thousand years ago.  But within the realm of social and political philosophies, people on the "left" tend to drift "right" as they get older. Why is that?

The reason is that the Left does not pay much attention to absolute truths that anchor human existence to meaning, and most people, even liberals, want to be able to say by the time they are on their deathbeds that their lives "had meaning."  In many ways, the Left reinvents the wheel with every undertaking then starts it rolling before it's round.  As we get older, our experience teaches us to look for patterns.  We then look for the unifying principles or universal truths behind the patterns so we can identify the next important pattern sooner.  This is a survival trait, the purpose of which is to prevent unnecessary death. 

The Right believes that there are universal, absolute truths, while the Left generally does not.  There are more people on the left who believe in nothing but feel a need to believe in something than there are people on the right who believe in something but would rather believe in nothing.  When people learn to see small patterns, they eventually learn to see large patterns.  These large patterns can be sweeping historical movements that threaten our civilization with extinction.  Extinction tends to concentrate the mind in a way that makes vacuous bumper-sticker slogans less persuasive.

But this works both ways:  People who believe that they cannot influence the course of events leading to their demise tend to be live-for-today liberals who would rather spend their remaining time gallivanting.  In contrast, those who believe that extinction is within their power to avoid tend to be conservatives who look toward building a longer, better future for their descendants to enjoy. 

There is a certain ironic interdependence between the liberals and conservatives in one respect:  The liberal artist who works feverishly to complete his masterpiece before succumbing to his libertine lifestyle will be more likely to be remembered by, and more likely to be significant to, those who would "conserve" his short life's work into the future generations.  At least the best artists know that the more conservative among us will ensure their remembrance.  After all, "A thing of beauty is a joy forever," said the dissolute Keats who died at age 25.

By the way, I'm sure readers will come up with examples that don't fit my generalizations.  If you believe that exceptions necessarily disprove generalizations, then three things are clear:  You do not understand what generalizations are, you have a compromised survival instinct, and you consider yourself liberal.

[ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED SEPTEMBER 13, 2006]

The right and the left in America both support freedom of speech, but it's the left that tries to limit free speech under the guise of so-called political correctness, which dictates the suppression of certain facts that do not comport with the wishful thinking of leftist utopians.  In fact, while leftists say they support free speech for everyone, they are referring mostly to their right to use obscenities and forms of vulgar non-speech in public simply because it stimulates their sex glands and annoys other people.  When it comes to substantive speech that reflects actual thinking, however, they do NOT support free speech from conservatives.  The reason is actually quite simple, having been stated clearly on many a bumper sticker: "Mean people suck." 

Conservatives believe that people should be responsible for their behavior.  In the eyes of liberals, such a philosophy puts an unreasonable burden on us human animals and limits our ability to live carefree, like cattle, while the ranchers in Washington take care of our every need.  Making people responsible for their own actions is mean.  Conservatives are mean.  Mean people suck.  They do not deserve the same rights as liberal cattle and the bureaucrats that herd them.

In a similar manner, Islam frowns on murdering human beings but defines Christians and Jews as pigs and monkeys so that the prohibition on murdering them does not apply.  Christians and Jews are to the jihadists what conservatives ("mean people") are the political left: subhumans who do not deserve full rights under the law.   

[ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED SEPTEMBER 10, 2006]

Last night I pulled into a favorite frozen-custard stand and ran into a young acquaintance who works as a technician at the nearby theater whence I had just come.  I hadn't seen him for months.  I parked next to his Suzuki GXR and we discussed motorcycles for a minute.  

His companion for the evening was an attractive blonde who appeared to be in her early 20s.  She had a pleasant smile and told me she wanted to be a professional actress, though she had never acted before.  She was going to audition for a role in the aforementioned theater's upcoming production of "Rocky Horror Picture Show," which I thought to myself would be good for her because that show has no acting requirements to speak of.  

My acquaintance told me that his brother had finally been sent to Iraq.  I told him that I wished his brother good luck, good health, and success in killing as many of the bad guys as possible.  At this, the blonde became quite animated, though her smile did not dim.

"Why do you support murder?" she asked me.

"I don't support murder," I said gently, sensing where this was going.  "Are you suggesting that soldiers who kill to defend innocent people are exactly the same as the deliberate murderers of the innocent the soldiers are trying to defend?"

"Well, yeah, particularly since that idiot hired those thugs to fly those planes into those buildings," she said, as her escort for the evening grinned at me and rolled his eyes to suggest that he's seen her go off like this before.

"What idiot?  Bin Laden?"

"No!  George Bush!"

So I asked her, "Do you really believe that Bush was behind the 9/11 attacks?  You know that makes no sense whatsoever, don't you?  Why in the world would he do something so crazy to make himself look bad and make his presidency a living nightmare for himself, not to mention for the rest of the country?"

"I've read a lot of things that suggest that there was a conspiracy!" she said, at which point her friend added that he had a DVD that alleged a conspiracy and that he thought that there were some shenanigans on the president's part.

"If that were the case, I wouldn't be so sanguine about my brother's putting himself in harm's way," I told him, adding that for them to believe in a conspiracy would mean that they would have to believe a whole series of things that were so unreasonable and illogical that no rational person would think they could be true.

The blonde blurted:  "All right, then prove me wrong.  Prove me wrong RIGHT NOW!"

"Most conspiracy theories about historical events are wrong," I replied, "because they are too convoluted to be reasonable.  Conspiracies are difficult to prove, but almost impossible to disprove.  Many people believe that the existence of God is a conspiratorial idea made up by a bunch of humans.  Wishing doesn't make something so, and belief alone does not call God into existence.  But even so, there's no way I can prove that God does not exist."

The woman seethed through her smile and said that I was not taking her seriously, and it was making her angry.  Her actual words were the most profane available in the English language, and I suppose I should be grateful that she felt comfortable enough to hurl them at someone four decades her senior whom she had known for less than three minutes.

I said, "Now you're talking like a typical liberal with the personal attacks here."

"Yes, I'm a liberal, and I'm proud of it!" she shot back.

"Well, please tell me, then, how Bush can be so stupid and yet mastermind such an elaborate plan with the aplomb of an evil genius?"

She actually tried to explain it by sputtering: "Well, then, you tell me why the United States never invades countries that don't have oil!  Just look at the oil prices!  They go up and down!  Don't tell me I don't think.  I'm the one who's a genius!"

I asked her whether she was a fellow member of Mensa.  She said that she had not taken the test, but some guy told her she was a genius because she can "set up a PHP site in six months."  Had I been smart enough to know what that meant, perhaps I could have said something more appropriate.  Instead, I asked her whether she thought she was smart enough to be President.  At that point the smile vanished, and she looked down at the sidewalk and said quietly, "No."

Then she picked right back up again and said, "But I don't think I'd be interested in doing that!

"I just think that we shouldn't put up with a President who stole both the elections he says he won.  Everyone knows he rigged those elections!  You can't tell me he didn't!"

"Sure I can," I said ever so kindly.  "There's no evidence that he did any such thing.  You're saying the same things about the election that you're saying about the 9/11 attacks, that they were both hoaxes.  Why would you want to believe anything like that? Because you like being miserable?  It's such a stretch of credibility to buy into nutty conspiracy theories that I'm amazed you can function day-to-day under such a cloud of irrationality."

It's difficult to make much headway with people who confuse thinking and nonthinking.  Both the blonde and her biker beau agreed that the United States was the "worst country in the world," in response to which I quoted Churchill on democracy and noted that we're the only country people actually wait in line to get into.  That did not seem to change their minds.   In fact, the blonde said that England was better, though she'd never been there.  

This exchange confirmed by observation that people who are liberal or leftist in their political views are more likely to believe what they want to believe.  Although "everyone believes what he wants to believe" is true to a point and even a cliché now, it's usually liberals who say it and live it.  In contrast, the people who are more "conservative" in their political views tend to believe in things not because they want to, but rather because their intellect tells them they must.  Their beliefs are based on evidence, and they are more likely to be "conservative" in their recognition of facts (i.e., they are less willing to "liberally" make facts up because it makes them feel good).  If new evidence convinces a conservative to change his thinking, then he will probably change his thinking.  Liberals can be persuaded by evidence as well, but they tend not to believe evidence that seems to contradict their artificial construct of the world as they wish it, and they tend to be too quick to believe rumors that fit their worldview before checking them out thoroughly.  They are likely to make up a conspiracy theory to justify the way they already think.  There are those who will say that if the words liberal and conservative in this paragraph were reversed, the statements would also be true.  I concede this to be a valid argument, but I still think that it is substantially truer the way I stated it.  Unlike most liberal haranguers, I do not hesitate to add that I might be wrong.

I must admit that it was fun talking to these two young, supposedly educated people about their country, but the longer we conversed the more like brick walls they seemed.  Besides, I had finished my custard, so I left, a bit depressed despite being full of sugar.

[ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED SEPTEMBER 9, 2006]

When my daughter was in seventh grade I asked her what she wanted to do for her science-fair project.  I always thought that science-fair projects were both dreadful and positive.  I had done plenty of them when I was in grade school and much later became a judge for competitive regional high-school fairs where serious scholarship money was at stake.  My daughter's older brother had participated in the middle-school fair when he had been her age.  Participation was not mandatory, nor was there any formal competition: In keeping with modern liberal education theory, everyone got the same blue ribbon for his project regardless of quality.  Still, participating in a science fair with a properly developed and supervised project was a good way to reinforce lessons in the scientific method, which is an essential tool for logical thinking.  Or so I thought.

To my dismay, my daughter informed me that the middle school had discontinued the science fair.  The professional educators in our public school system, which is ranked tops in the state, had determined that the educational value of science fairs was no longer all that great.  The reasoning behind this determination, my daughter said, was based on two things, namely that kids think science is boring and that their parents do all the work anyway.

Before I got wound up on another one of my what-is-the-world-coming-to tirades, my daughter was quick to add that the faculty had come up with a "better idea" that was more relevant to the educational needs of our precious future leaders of America and would give them practice in something far more useful than the scientific method.  That something was the PowerPoint presentation.

Apparently, statistics show that most American schoolchildren would rather become communicators than scientists or engineers.  Being a professional communicator, like Katie Couric, Britney Spears, or a typical schoolteacher, seems to most kids like easy work without a lot of math involved.  And even if they went into business or politics, expressing one's ideas in the universal language of PowerPoint was essential to conveying one's thoughts to the other side of the bargaining table.

The school did pay lip service to science by limiting the PowerPoint presentations to particular scientific subjects.  Apparently, it is more useful to be able to "dialog" about scientists than it is to actually know how to do science, so the task was this:  "Prepare two PowerPoint presentations about the life of a scientist and an engineer on the list below, explaining what their contributions were to his or her field."   Apparently it's not what you know, it's whom you know:  Knowing scientific principals is better than knowing scientific (or grammatical) principles.

In the old days, this would be an English assignment to write a short biography, but with PowerPoint one can make a dull subject dance with text movement, pictures and sound.

Well, my daughter looked over the official list of scientists and engineers and decided to ask the teacher whether she could choose two subjects who were not on the approved list but who stimulated her interest because she had already learned something about them on her own.

For the scientist, she picked black-hole cosmologist Steven Hawking. For the engineer, she picked iconic architect Frank Lloyd Wright, since engineering is the better part of architecture.  The teacher had not heard of either of these two people, but after a quick Google search approved my daughter's request anyway.

Because my daughter is a talented artist in her own right, her PowerPoint presentations were aesthetically pleasing.  The thing that made me feel best about the education she was getting, however, was her conclusion, which tied both presentations together and said just about everything that needed to be said about this experiment in science fair evolution:

"The achievements of these two men in their respective fields were substantial and significant, but not as great as they could have been if they had known PowerPoint."

In my day, such sarcasm would have invited a D or even an F, but my daughter got an A on both her presentations.  Unfortunately, so did every other kid.

[ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED SEPTEMBER 1, 2006]

Because I was reared in the South—inside the Capitol Beltway in northern Virginia, which to true southerners makes me practically a Yankee—I have been questioned and even ridiculed about the illiterate and slovenly way southerners speak. When I attended an elite Ivy League college, my more enlightened classmates from New England immediately categorized me as an illiterate racist cracker, because of two small idiosyncrasies in my own dialect:  I pronounced the word "ruin" as a one-syllable word that almost rhymes with groin, based on a Romance-language-based pronunciation of the letter "i" as a long "e," rather than as the short "i" in the word "in": I said "rooeen" instead of the allegedly more literate two-syllable "roo-in."  I thought it was ironic that I had learned to pronounce ruin "like a typical southern bigot" from my mother, who was born in Oregon and reared in Detroit.  The other giveaway of my linguistic barbarism was my pronunciation of the word "any" as "iny," like the belly button.

Many southerners pronounce all sorts of short a's and short e's like short i's.  Fortunately, I pronounced the word pen like pen instead of like pin, saving me from having to clarify it with a modifier.  Because Southerners pronounce both pen and pin like "pin," they have to remember to use the term "straight pin" when they're in sewing classes up north.  Down south, a straight pin is just a pin, while a writing pen is an "ink pin."

What occasions this piece today is the flowering of sweet justice:  One of the questions I got from my enlightened northern friends, and which I continue to get to this day here on the Lake Erie shore where I'm well ensconced among them, is why southerners say "y'all" when they mean "you."  I explain patiently that the critics apparently haven't been listening closely enough to learn the grammatical rules, for "y'all" (obviously a contraction of "you all") evolved from a courteous desire to be even more precise in speaking.  In Standard English the second-person singular and second-person plural are exactly the same: "you."  When more than one person might be in the room, "you" might lead to confusion about whether the speaker is addressing a certain person or all of them.  For this reason, "y'all" preserves a distinction that permits more clarity and precision.  Only the most observant Northerner would notice that y'all is never used when addressing just one person.

The advantage of this manner of speaking, which Yankees call stupid and slovenly, has finally been recognized in certain northern dialects with the inclusion in most new dictionaries of a particular northern variety of the second-person plural, namely, "youse."  Curiously, the silent "e" at the end does nothing to distinguish the pronunciation of "youse" from douse, grouse, house, louse, mouse, and rouse.  To most southerners, "youse" is a pretty strong hint that the speaker is from the north, because it's usually surrounded by a lot of other mispronounced and misused words.  [Cf. "Hey, youse guys!" when addressing females.]  Still, "youse" has never been used to paint with a broad brush all Yankees as illiterate;  just the white trash.